Despite its throat-scraping screams of terror, The Quiet Ones is absolutely mute when it comes to contributing to the horror genre in any meaningful way.

An experiment involving students at Oxford in 1974 leads a skeptical few to realizing that the force they seek to reduce to terms most familiar is far more sinister and deadly than they can imagine.

Wanna know what I can't imagine? Why a film with such fine and devoted acting can't do anything but occupy space as another "show up the skeptics" piece of cinema where the supernatural elements are over-utilized and where sudden shocks and cheap "jump" surprises typical of possession-style horrors unjustly dominate the screenplay.
It is one of the most well acted horrors in a long time, with Cooke as a perfect pick for her part, but it manages to throw out its nicely stirred pot of ingredients – with plenty of soft, erotic elements put in – and let it dissolve into another "mysterious cult / unknown demon" eye-roller.

The potential here was nothing short of amazing, the dimensional nuances so acutely honed, and yet it fast became just another lesson in how the scariest things in a movie are the things we don't see, the things we are made to guess and wonder about, rather than bizarre levitations or strange ancient markings. We've had enough of the latter.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It’s a sad testimony when even the creator of a thing realizes that the product isn’t what it was intended to be. Well, actually it’s a good thing. It just doesn’t happen often enough. The Christian music industry is, shall we say, not up to par with where its admirers (and even creators and ardent well-wishers) would hope it would be. And when even the average believer realizes that their music is not market-cornering stuff, all should know that there is a problem.

Now not all Christian music sucks (you might even find a few rock songs from artists like Petra on Joe Holman’s ipod that he still sometimes listens to and enjoys), but what makes the stuff that does suck suck is that what sucks sucks for a number of different reasons. We begin the countdown going from best of the worst to absolute worst...

It’s a subject that is rarely tackled in any form outside of random questions on a message board, but here we will devote a sensible examination of it. Who – what – is the most powerful being anywhere in every realm of sci-fi or fantasy ever dreamt up by a finite human being? I’ve been contemplating this subject since I was 8 years old. At 39, it hasn’t left my mind. That means several things; (1) I’m a fucking geek. (2) I’ve invested enough of my life pondering this for it to qualify as an obsession.

As with all “Most” anything lists, we are faced with several problems, one of them being limited source material. A couple of these only made one or two brief appearances somewhere and that is all we have to go by. But sometimes, those situations let our imaginations go into overdrive and give us even more creative fun. The mystery tends to add to the experience of contemplation.

Claim to fame: This Douwd went from pacifist to mass murderer of 50 billion in a single moment of anger. He appears to hold the record for most murders in all of sci-fi.Abilities: Just about unlimited.Nature: True immortals.

Our winner, debatably edging out number #2, is a mysterious race of beings called the Douwds. We only get to meet one of their kind in a single episode (#51, season 3 - see the condensed version here) called “The Survivors.” It was one of the very best of any season. What little we know of this illusive race “of disguises and false surroundings” only adds to our fascination with them.

When the Enterprise gets an urgent distress call from a federation colony on Delta Rana IV about an attacking alien warship, they head over as fast as they can, but they are days away. By the time they arrive, it is too late. All are dead and the planet has been literally leveled…with the sole exception of one house and the small pa…